


Task Acquired: Learn About the Pale

by sharkinfishnets



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Mild Spoilers, Post-Canon, canon typical existential despair, kim is there but only in a dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22179967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkinfishnets/pseuds/sharkinfishnets
Summary: The case is over, you're back home. Even if some questions were never answered, and some loose ends were never tied up.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	Task Acquired: Learn About the Pale

Tapes spin in their reels, the world spins on its axis. You mind spins too, in the fragile casing of your skull. One wrong move and it could spin out and spit tape all over the floor, Harry. You’re sprawled out on the couch of your Jamrock apartment, dual wielding a can of beer and a cigarette. You can try to convince yourself that you look “cool” in a casual, devil-may-care kind of way, but you’re no Man of Hjelmdall. Dual zweihanders these are not, and disheveled is not a good look on you. It can’t be helped though, that shit is brain fuel. Gotta put gas in the motor carriage before it’ll run. Even if it’s shitty gas that will give you lung cancer and liver damage somewhere down the line, if it hasn’t already. This metaphor is falling apart, you were thinking about something else. Motor carriage... Kim... the case you just finished! There we go, right back on track. It resolved… surprisingly well, all things considered. Most of those things being you. The killer was caught, you got your gun back (thank god Jean didn’t end up catching your lie that you had found it. Instead it simply became a pre-emptive truth), and Kim safely returned to his precinct. No reason to be sad, nothing to cry over. 

And yet, there is bitterness to this conclusion. There were things you could have done differently. People you could have helped. Six person massacres (seven if you count Ruby) that you could have prevented. You never followed through on your promise (threat?) to perform karaoke at the Whirling. You never figured out what the deal with the two millimeter hole in the world from the church was. You never asked Joyce what the Pale really was. You take another sip of your (extra cheap) beer and let the dangling loose ends prick against your brain. The Pale… a hand beckons from behind the curtain of your lingering amnesia, something so fundamental that you have trouble grasping it in its entirety. Like if you had forgotten about the concept of death. That kind of fundamental. The knowledge is there, it’s written in the spinning magnetic tapes of your mind. You just can’t access it. 

There has to be some way to jumpstart your addled brain, right? You glower at the wall through the lazy cloud of smoke that is slowly filling your apartment. There’s an ugly splotch on the wall, slowly being obscured as the air quality inside continues to nosedive. Wait. Jamrock has a public library, underfunded as it is. Even the most basic of basic stores of information should have something as fundamental as this tucked away somewhere, right? Maybe the children’s section? It’s worth a shot, after all you can’t exactly go back and ask Joyce. Oh, lucky you, Harry. Tomorrow’s a day off! Nothing but your own fear of the unknown can keep you from traipsing down to the library and breaking your fragile little mind even more than you already have! The stain on the wall is almost totally undetectable now, swallowed up by the film of grey lurking around you. Tomorrow will bring answers. You can feel it. You take one last puff on the rapidly shortening cigarette, then stub it out in the ashtray. That’s enough nicotine for tonight.

You dream about something other than your own bloated corpse or Her for the first time in recent memory. You’re with Kim, sitting in the passenger seat of the Kineema as the two of you drive through a dark forest. Muffled, twisted static pours over the radio speakers and fills the space between you. You can almost parse human speech out of the garbled melody, but not quite. Just as you think you have a handle on what’s being said, it slips through your fingers. Kim doesn’t seem to care, he’s focused on the road ahead of him, headlights carving a halogen path through the darkness. It’s the only light for miles, the sky is studded with neither moon nor stars, but it’s enough for you to see trees whiz by as you pass them. You turn your head and look at Kim. Reflected light glints off his glasses and you finally pick out a phrase being crooned from the radio.

“.....want to be free………..”

“Hey, Kim?”

He doesn’t respond, all he does is keep driving silently.

“Kim? Hello?”

Nothing.

“He can’t hear you, Harry-boy. You lost your chance already,” Comes a voice from the back seat of the car that sounds like yours, but if you had eaten gravel for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the past week. The deepest, most fundamental part of your brain doesn’t rest due to something as trivial as sleep.

“A week wasn’t long enough for you, was it? Oh… Harry, Harry, Harry…. He isn’t gone, but you have no way to see him, speak with him, learn more about him, so he might as well be to you, am I right?” This voice is higher, reedier, but still sounds like a part of you. “Still there….. But with no way to get to him……….”

You grab Kim by the arm and pull so that he faces you. His gaze goes right through you. It hurts more than any failed check or bullet you’ve taken. The Kineema swerves with the movement, and veers off the road into a tree. Lovely. Another destroyed motor carriage, and this time you didn’t even need the power of alcohol to do it.

“Ain’t that just the way,” Growls Ancient Reptilian Brain. “Another day, another opportunity thrown by the wayside and ground into the dirt.” But it’s not like there’s anything else you could have done, was there? It was a temporary partnership formed over a dead body and an interdepartmental pissing contest, it was destined to end before it even began. “Is that what you really think, Harry?” Yes. No. Maybe? It’s better than twisting yourself up over what ifs, isn’t it? The front windshield of the Kineema is spiderwebbed with cracks, blossoming from where it made contact with the tree. The impact was jarring, but you don’t seem to be injured. You look over at the driver’s seat, to make sure Kim is OK. But the seat is empty, he isn’t there. You missed your chance. Congratulations, all you’ve managed to do is trade emotionally harrowing dreams about one person for another.

You had fallen asleep on the couch, still slouched into an uncomfortable sitting position that cannot be good for your back. At least you put out the cigarette before crashing, lighting your apartment on fire is not a task you want to complete anytime soon. You were planning to go to the Jamrock Public Library, right? To get information about the Pale. With all the power you have, you drag yourself up off the couch and stand up. Well, no time like the present, you suppose. You stretch, feeling your joints pop, and glance out the window. Grey sky, still-bare trees rustling in the wind. If you look closely enough, you can almost see Martinaise from here. Looks cold, better grab a jacket.

You had entirely forgotten that you had amnesia, which does indeed extend to your knowledge of Jamrock’s layout. That is to say, getting to the Jamrock Public Library was significantly more difficult than you initially expected, not helped by the fact that your motor carriage is still sunk off the coast of Martinaise. You only got home the other day because Jean knew where you lived. You did make it to the library in the end, mostly due to luck. Your main strategy was to close your eyes, spin around until you were thoroughly disoriented, and walk in that direction until you hit something. The luck was less for actually finding the place, and more to avoid being flattened by a speeding motor carriage. You eventually stumble into the front doors of the Jamrock Public Library anyhow, so score one point for your patented “Doom Spiral Technique” (so named after a certain drunk from the coast). You pull open the door and walk inside, striding towards the front desk. Confidence is key, Harry. You’re a super cool, totally competent police officer superstar. You have a badge AND a gun now. Note: pulling your gun out in a library is a phenomenally bad idea, and will likely get you kicked out before you can get any information. You can just rent the books if you really need to, no need to rob the place. The receptionist (thankfully) does not seem to recognize you, and merely asks “Anything I can help you find, sir?”, to which you of course respond:

“I am the law.”

“Right, of course you are. So are you looking for anything or did you just come in to tell me that?” The bored looking woman replies, leaning her elbows on the desk. Right, right. You did come here for a specific reason.

“I’m looking for books about the Pale” 

She purses her lips. “I’m not sure we have anything suitable for technical research, if that’s what you’re after. You would have better luck somewhere else. Though, if you have a specific title in mind I could try and get it shipped here--”

“Ah, no that’s alright. Something basic is all I need,” You wouldn’t really know what to do with a technical entroponetics document even if you got your hands on one anyway, so no big loss there. The receptionist seems to relax slightly.

“We probably have some basic stuff around. I know there’s a few tucked in the back corner, but if you ask me, those are mostly pseudoscience or just plain conjecture. There might be something good, but who knows,” She shifts in her seat, racking her brain for more answers. “Depending on who this is for, we might have one or two in the children’s section too, but that’s up to you.” Nice, now you have some options on the table. You may as well gather up everything you can find on the topic and dig in. You thank the receptionist for her help and wander off to look around the library. 

The shelves are crammed a bit too close together for comfort, trying to fit more bookshelves into a space not quite big enough. You eventually squeeze through the shelves into the corner the receptionist had pointed too. It takes a bit of scanning the titles, but you find a tidy selection of books on the Pale. Moving your hand over the shelf, you decide to pick a random one from the center and crack it open right here, just to get a feel for it.

This seems to be a tome of wild speculation on the possible benefits of Pale exposure for artistic purposes. You still don’t really have a grasp on what the Pale is in the first place, but that seems profoundly dangerous nonetheless. The book continues to go into detail on how the Pale can be used to “adopt new perspectives” and “see beyond the veil of reality”. That sounds great and all, but it’s not really what you’re looking for right now. You make a mental not of its location, so you can further your quest to become the Art Cop to end all Art Cops later. The other books on the shelf are of a similar nature. Lots of phrases that sound cool, but don’t hold any meaning if you don’t have a basic level of knowledge on what they’re talking about in the first place. Maybe you really will have better luck in the children’s section.

After wandering around and taking in the atmosphere of the almost-empty library some more (meaning that you got lost and had to whip out the ol’ “Doom Spiral Technique” again), you spot the children’s section. It’s an oasis of primary colors and bean bag chairs within a building that favors such exciting colors as “beige” or “taupe”. Bean bag chairs are very disco, this you are certain of. You pace the section for a good while, hunched forward to read book titles off the waist-high shelves, before stopping in front of a book titled “The Pale and The Isolas: 101 Cool Facts”. Perfect. You snatch it out of the shelf and tuck it under your arm before plodding over to one of the brightly colored bean bag chairs and flopping down into it. Time to learn 101 cool facts about the world you live in, detective. Looking at the cover seems to make a knot form in your stomach. Are you sure you should be reading this? Once you learn something, you can’t really unlearn it, barring another bout of amnesia. This could be an awful idea, maybe even on par with whipping your gun out in a library. You summon all your Volition and pry open the cover anyway. Since when has something being a bad idea stopped you from doing it?

Most of the book consists of tidbits about how mysterious and unknown the Pale is, phrased in a way that’s supposed to sound “cool” to young children. But the more you read, the tighter the knot in your stomach becomes. The Pale is nothing, nothing at all. That’s why it’s so terrifying. 101 facts are more than enough to jog your memory, to rip open the curtain and let the light in. Long after you’re dead, long after everyone you know is dead, the city of Revachol will collapse into grey mist. Then Revachol will be dead too, shorn into nonsense by something no amount of side questing or Superstar Cops can fix. The space it once occupied never to be claimed by another force, and all whispers of the city will grow quiet. Turns out that all those times you rambled on about the apocalypse, you were 100% right. Congratulations. You slouch further into the bean bag chain and turn to look out the window at the front of the building. The Porch Collapse is still far from any current urban center, but if you squint the right way, it almost looks like all that nothing could be lurking just outside the Jamrock Public Library, waiting patiently for you to step outside into its grasp. You can’t really be “grasped” by nothingness, but regardless, you feel like you’re suffocating because of it. It’s that or your tie is too tight. 

No wonder Kim was so adamant about you not talking to Joyce about this during your reality lowdown. Your mental state was already more fragile than normal (if that’s even possible), due to alcohol-induced amnesia. Hearing about this while you were in the middle of a convoluted murder investigation likely would not have been fun. The book slips out of your hand onto the floor, and you slide further down in the bean bag chair. Kim… He would know how to deal with this. Kim would pat you on the back and tell you something practical but ultimately caring, before requesting that you focus on the case at hand instead of on having an existential crisis. But Kim isn’t here, and he doesn’t say those things, so you continue to focus on your crisis instead.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit longer than the snippets I usually write, so I hope the pacing isn't too funky. Apparently you can get through the entire game without learning about the Pale, which is super nuts. Part of me wants to continue this, even if I don't really have a plot in mind. If I ever come up with something cool, maybe I'll write more? Who knows.


End file.
